The Marine's Dual Role: Killer And Diplomat

Special Report: On The Ground With Charlie Company

June 11, 2006|By JESSE HAMILTON; Courant Staff Writer

FALLUJAH, Iraq — The going rate for an Iraqi life is $2,500.

In his weekly trip to the Civil-Military Operations Center in downtown Fallujah, the battalion's judge advocate hands out cash to Iraqis. A few hundred dollars for a car scraped by a Marine vehicle in a tight alley. A thousand for a collapsed wall.

And the maximum payout -- $2,500 in hundred dollar bills -- for an Iraqi death involving Marines.

In Fallujah, it's a Marine's job to take certain lives, and it's a Marine's job to pay for others. Marines are here to build a government and they are here to destroy an insurgency, so each one in this downtown base is both a highly trained killer and a street-level diplomat.

There's no shortage of work for either, and the roles can flip in an instant.

The 1st Battalion, 25th Marines -- called ``New England's Own'' and including Plainville-based Charlie Company -- is the authority in and around Fallujah. In the ``Tigris Room'' of the city's equivalent to a town hall, Capt. Jeff King, the battalion's judge advocate, sits across a desk from one city resident after another. Next to him is a sergeant with a backpack holding about $35,000 in U.S. currency.

A man sits down. He says Marines who detained him for questioning stole $6,000 from a vase in his home. Though highly unlikely, it's a claim King hears regularly. This time, he believes money was stolen, but not by Marines.

``We couldn't find any evidence that Marines took the money,'' he tells the man. But King assures him, ``If there's an allegation that someone took money, we take that very seriously.''

Even though Marines didn't do it, King says he'll try to compensate the man for some of it, anyway. The sympathetic young captain from Dallas doesn't like to turn people away. Maybe by giving out a little money, he figures, he will make a friend for the Marines in a hostile city.

Out in the lobby, people read newspapers and fan themselves in the heat, waiting to see King or the other captain, Joseph Androski from Ansonia. The room smells of sweat and stale patience. A stereo pumps out Arabic music.

A desperate father occupies one of the seats, holding his limp boy in his lap. He didn't come for bureaucracy, but for help in the most basic way. He brought his badly burned son -- the skin seared from his legs in an accident while playing with matches -- to find medical help that he knows he can't get at the rundown hospital in Fallujah. Navy corpsmen, the medics who work with Marines, agree to treat the boy's burns in a back room. The boy's small cries can be heard under the music in the lobby.

King keeps working on claims, many of them brought by Iraqi lawyers in stacks of four or five. King maintains a fast pace, trying to verify the truth of the claims, asking for pictures and documents, sometimes giving the benefit of the doubt. The money is put in Iraqi palms by the sergeant.

The death claims are sometimes from military convoys firing warning shots at cars that edge too close or at drivers who seem a threat. Other times, it's crossfire from a firefight with insurgents. If King can find records of a Marine clash that even loosely match the details of the claim, he'll pay out, even though the fatal shots more likely come from insurgent rounds than the more accurate Marines.

Today, he pays a woman for her child and a man for his father. Condolence money, he says, not compensation.

In the first week in the city for Charlie Company, when Iraqis shot at 20-year-old James Lauber from Waterbury, when his buddies scrambled to fire back, when he found himself in the stretched seconds of a real gun battle, Lauber was living up to his name.

He's the third James Lauber of his Connecticut family, the third generation to bear that name and to enlist in the Marines. As he dodged bullets in those first days in Fallujah, it might as well have been North Korean gunfire, echoing through the generations.

His grandfather, James V. Lauber, of Cheshire, fought in Korea, living in bunkers and trenches, staring out across a front line. The war ended for him in 1953 when a close sniper bullet shattered, driving pieces of metal into him.

The next generation, Lance Cpl. James A. Lauber of Waterbury, joined in 1974, at the tail end of the Vietnam War. He joined the military police, wanting to be a Connecticut state trooper when he finished his four years, though an injury prevented it. His Marine years were spent working at a military jail.

James R. Lauber, known as ``J.R.,'' wanted to be his grandfather's kind of Marine, going toe to toe with enemies in a straightforward fight. In that first Fallujah firefight, he thought he got his wish. But two months later, his duties are something different, probably more familiar to his father than his grandfather.